A DIP INTO THE UNDERWORLD
"When I go back home," he said, "and tell them about this they won't
believe it."
It was a pleasant April Sunday afternoon. We were sitting very
comfortably in a saloon over Third Avenue way about the middle of
Manhattan Island. Throngs of customers came and went through the front
door, whose wicket gate was seldom still. Whiskey glasses twinkled and
tinkled all along the long bar. Only here and there in the closely
packed line of patrons stood one with a tall "schooner" of beer before
him. Harry and Ed, in very soiled white jackets, led an active life.
You see, since theoretically intoxicants were not being sold, there was
no occasion for the pretence of being closed on Sunday and confining
business to the side door and the back room. On the table between us lay
a newspaper. Its headlines proclaimed yesterday's "liquor raids,"
thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of "rum" confiscated by the
city police in the progress of the campaign resulting from the recent
passage of the New York State "dry" law.
At the bottom of the page was a little story of the conviction of a
delicatessen dealer somewhere on the outskirts of Brooklyn on whose
premises had been discovered by the authorities a small amount of wine
containing more than one-half of one per cent alcohol.
Pete came in hurriedly. Harry and Ed glanced at him questioningly. He
nodded to them as though to say "yes," and dropped into the chair before
us. "They're comin'," he remarked. "About half a block off." Every
whiskey glass had suddenly disappeared from the bar.
Pete, a little grey man now of about fifty who arises for the day at
about noon, has had an interesting career. Once upon a time he was a
"bell-hop" in Albany. He is a devoted patron of the silent drama and a
man of intellectual interests--making a hobby of clipping from
newspapers poems and editorials which impress him and reading them
several months later to chance acquaintances who are too drowsy to
oppose him. His connection with this establishment is light and
picturesque. His duties are chiefly social. That is, he sees home one
after another customers who require that friendly attention. He is
perpetually agreeable to the suggestion of gratuitous refreshment. He is
very cheerful and gentlemanly in the matter of accommodating his tastes
to any liquid from ten-cent beer to ninety-cent Scotch which the
purchaser is disposed to pay for.
Here they were! The two police officers strolled in slowly, smiling. In
their blue and their gold buttons they looked very respendent against
the somewhat shabby scene. Ranged along before the bar were a number of
young men in the uniform of private soldiers. There were several
sailors. Here was a postman cheering himself on his rounds. There was a
huge fellow the nickel plate on whose cap announced that he was a piano
mover. The centre of a group, there was a very large man who looked as
though he had something darkly to do with ward politics. At one place in
the line was a very dapper little Japanese, who produced his money from
a wallet carried in his breast pocket. But mostly the motley company was
of the riff-raff order of humanity. That is another one of the curious
developments of "prohibition." Here, in all places of this character,
you may find an endless number of the sort of men who used to be
accustomed to paying as little as ten cents for a drink of very fiery
and inferior whiskey, now standing before the bar by the hour and paying
from fifty to seventy-five cents for whiskey (if you can call it that)
considerably worse. How on earth can they do it? I do not know.
The two policemen moved the length of the room, and came to a halt at
the open end of the bar. Here they stood for a couple of moments,
observing (I felt with some amusement) Harry and Ed serving their
beakers of beer. Then, as though suddenly having a bright idea, one of
them made his way along back of the bar to the cigar case at the front
end. He stooped, opened the sliding panel at the bottom of this and
poked around inside with his club. As he came along behind the bar back
to the open end he stooped several times to peer at the shelf below. He
joined his comrade, the two of them thrust their heads into the back
room, and then moved out through the side door.
"Well, we're safe for another hour," said Pete. "Why couldn't they find
the stuff?" I asked him. "I'll bet you couldn't find it if you'd go
behind the bar yourself," he answered. Harry and Ed had found it within
two seconds after the shadow of the law had lifted. And the room was
humming with the sound of renewed, and somewhat hectic, conviviality.
"We'll get caught pretty soon though, I guess," observed Johnnie, the
Italian "chef," who on week-days served the economical lunch of roast
beef sandwiches and "hot dogs." Harry and Ed laughed in a rather
uncomfortable way. But for the present, at least, business was too brisk
for their thoughts to be distracted more than a second or two from the
job.
"The old man," remarked Pete, referring to the proprietor, "is on a toot
again. Been under the weather for about a week now. He always gets that
way whenever one of the new law scares comes along. Gets worried or sore
or something and that upsets him."
Pete hadn't been very well himself for several days. Sick in bed, he
said, yesterday. He never used to be sick at all, "in the old days," he
declared, no matter how much he had taken the day before. Never had a
headache, or bad stomach, or anything like that. A little nervous,
perhaps, yes. "But it's the kind of stuff we get nowadays," he thought.
"There hasn't been time since prohibition started for the system to get
trained to react to this TNT stuff, like it was to regular liquor. Maybe
in ten years or in the next generation people's systems will have got
adjusted to this kind of poison and it'll be all right with 'em." It's
an interesting idea, I think.
A customer was requesting Ed to "fix him up" a pint flask. No, it
couldn't be done just now, as the supply was running too low for it to
be passed out that much at a time. The disappointed customer tried to
content himself with endeavoring to absorb as much of a pint as he could
obtain through a rapidly consumed series of single drinks. And pretty
soon it was officially announced from the bar that there would be "no
more until nine o'clock in the morning." I gathered that the reserve
stock was upstairs or downstairs and that the "old man" had gone away
with the key.
We went forth to take a walk, Pete accompanying us as a sort of
cicerone, and discoursing with much erudition of bar-rooms as we went.
"These places are getting scarce," he observed. "There don't seem to be
any, or there seems to be hardly any of the old places uptown," I
remarked. "Oh! no; not in residential neighborhoods," he replied; and I
inferred that the law was, in deference to the innocent spirit of
domesticity, keener-eyed there. "And there ain't but very few below the
dead-line downtown," Pete said.
They have, the bars, very largely disappeared from Broadway. Have been
gone from that thoroughfare for some time. And in this thought we come
upon one of the great mockeries of the situation which has existed since
the Eighteenth Amendment went (more or less) into effect. What I mean is
this: A great many people who had no ferocious opposition to the idea of
a cocktail being drunk before a meal, or wine with it, or even a liqueur
after it, did detest the saloon. It was the institution of the common,
corner saloon, I fancy, at which the bulk of American temperance
sentiment was directed.
The perverse operation of prohibition then was this: It ceased to be
possible (openly) to obtain any alcoholic beverage in anything like
wholesome surroundings, in a first-class restaurant or hotel or in a
gentleman's club. But in New York City, as is known to everybody who
knows anything at all about the matter, the saloons, and particularly
the lower class of saloons, have flourished as never before.
As we crossed Broadway Pete pointed out one place which had been going
until a short time ago, an odious looking place (as I remember it)
within. It was but a short way from a club of distinguished membership.
So much had this doggery become frequented by these gentlemen that it
became jocularly known among them as the "club annex."
Continuing on over into the West Side, here was a place, now a shop
dealing in raincoats, but formerly a "gin-mill" where throughout this
last winter there had been an extraordinary infusion of Bacardi rum,
drunk neat, as their favorite drink, by its multitudinous customers. And
there was a place, a baby carriage exhibited for sale in its window now,
which as a saloon had burned out one night not long ago; when its
proprietor accepted the catastrophe with striking cheerfulness, withdrew
his business activities to his nearby apartment and took up calling upon
old customers by appointment. Innumerable the places over which Pete
breathed a sigh, which had lately turned into tobacco stores or candy
shops.
We turned in at a door on Sixth Avenue. A little more caution seemed to
be observed here than at the place we had just left. But Pete, of
course, would pass any scrutiny. The liquor bottle, you noted, stood
within the safe at the inner end of the bar, its door hanging ready at
any moment to be kicked to. The barman covered with his hand the little
glasses he set out until you took them, and admonished, "Get away with
it!" The drinks were eighty cents a throw, but they had the feel of
genuine good-grade rye.
Night had fallen. We passed into the back room, where a pathetic object
was banging dismal tunes on a rattle-trap of a piano. A party of four
entered. The young women were very young and decidedly attractive. The
two couples began to circle about in a dance. Next moment came a
terrific thundering on the front of the building. "Cop wants less
noise," said the waiter to the dancers; "you'll have to quit." "Throw
that into you," he said to the seated customer he was serving, and
directly whisked away the glasses.
"When I go back home," said my friend from the Middle West, "and tell
them about this they won't believe it."